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The American Prospect - articles by authorenMasked Identity Politicshttp://prospect.org/article/masked-identity-politics
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>A purple-skinned alien hurtles across the cosmos, bearing a ring that grants its wearer unimaginable power. The alien is mortally wounded, and the ring is seeking its next wearer -- the Green Lantern, Earth's champion -- by finding the planet's most courageous inhabitant.</p>
<p>In a world with billions of people, what are the chances that the ring's next owner is a white American dude?</p>
<p>Pretty high, apparently. In DC Comics' <i>Showcase #22</i>, released in 1959, the power ring chose Hal Jordan, a dashing military test pilot modeled on a young Paul Newman. Jordan would become a founding member of the Justice League of America, DC Comics' flagship superhero team, and one of its most famous characters. And while comics, over time, began to challenge that whiteness, two major films to be released this summer avoid the critiques on race found in the original comics.</p>
<p>In the early days, whiteness was so pervasive in comics that it could actually span the universe: a Kryptonian Superman could crash-land in Kansas and pass as an ordinary white farm boy. In the 1960s, though, comic-book publishers began trying to create nonwhite heroes. As the civil-rights movement came to dominate the national conversation, a young white artist named Neal Adams tried to subtly incorporate black characters into the newspaper strip he was illustrating. "I come out of a time when bigotry was a lot more subtle than it [was] in the days of slavery," Adams says. "Not for the people who had it working against them but for the people who walked around saying, 'There's no problem, right?'" His world in New York City, Adams says, was full of people who did not think of themselves as Southern-style racists.</p>
<p>But Adams drew and submitted an installment of a syndicated comic strip featuring a black doctor and a white ambulance driver in one panel. When he later saw proofs of the strip, he realized that higher-ups had switched the characters' heads. The higher-ups told him audiences would be confused by a black doctor.</p>
<p>When Adams got to DC Comics, where he worked on the Green Lantern in the early 1970s, he started to push back. "I asked [my editor] what happens if Hal Jordan gets killed," Adams says. "They tell me they have a backup." That backup turned out to be a blond gym teacher from the Midwest.</p>
<p>Adams, however, thought that the secondary Green Lantern should be black. So, with his editor's approval, he and writer Dennis O'Neil created John Stewart, a black architect who would later become the main Green Lantern. (In the early drafts, Adams says, an editor wanted to name the character Lincoln Washington; Adams talked him out of it.) "I'm very proud of that," he says. "I'm glad that [my editor] was open to it and malleable. But it did have to be explained to him."</p>
<p>John Stewart served as a critique of the default whiteness of comics. (Alas, it would be a while longer before the planet would get its first female Green Lantern.) But many early attempts to increase diversity in comic panels were awkward, incomplete, or tone-deaf. The panels were also chockablock with superpowered tokenism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was Black Lightning, who was black and electrical. And Black Goliath, who was black and a giant. And Nubia, who was black and Wonder Woman. And there was Luke Cage, who, in his earliest incarnations, was a jive-talking powerhouse in a butterfly collar who fought crime for money.</p>
<p>In more established comics like <i>Superman</i>, writers even created a segregated Krypton to explain why Superman looked like a white human. "Way back in the '70s, Vathlo Island was introduced to Superman's history," says David Brothers, who runs the popular comics blog 4thletter. That storyline referenced an island that was home to "a highly advanced black race" -- who presumably chose to self-segregate. "I'm sure 'they were really smart and a credit to their race,'" says Brothers, "but you know, hindsight makes even well-meaning attempts look pretty bad."</p>
<p>It was in this still largely white comics world that in the 1990s, DC Comics helped start Milestone Media, an influential, if short-lived, comics imprint meant to correct the racial disparity. Its titles featured a multiethnic cast of characters created by artists and writers of color. Milestone even created a Superman-like hero, Icon, and it's worth noting the explanation of his racial identity: Unlike Superman, who came to Earth as a Caucasian, Icon was conditioned to adopt the appearance of the first inhabitants he came across; in this case, it was the early 1800s, and he was discovered by a slave after crash-landing in the American South.</p>
<p>Milestone was co-founded by Dwayne McDuffie, who was black and would go on to write for a host of titles. He later became a writer for the Cartoon Network's <i>Justice League</i>, which debuted in the early aughts. The writing staff chose the Stewart version of the Green Lantern specifically because the rest of the show's superhero cast -- which included an Amazon and an alien policewoman who was part hawk -- was white. (Except for the Martian guy. He was green.) For a generation of superhero fans weaned on the popular cartoon series, the black Green Lantern has been the only one they've ever known. "If you ask a kid who Green Lanterns is, the kid will say it's John Stewart," Adams says.</p>
<p>The inclusion of nonwhite characters in the <i>Justice League of America</i> comic raised hackles among fans who thought McDuffie was trying to enforce a quota system on the pages. "The quota arguments ... crack me up," McDuffie said in an interview last year in the documentary <i>Shaft or Sidney Poitier: Black Masculinity in Comic Books</i>. "Which fictional character is losing a job?" (McDuffie died in February due to complications from heart surgery.)</p>
<p>McDuffie's efforts won't make it onto the big screen, though. When the big-budget <i>Green Lantern</i> movie rolls out in mid-June, white heartthrob <i>du jour</i> Ryan Reynolds will wield the power ring as Hal Jordan, the original white character. Captain America, another iconic superhero, is getting his own tentpole summer flick, out in July. Like the Green Lantern comic-book character's story, Captain America's mythology has been reimagined to explicitly comment on American racism. And like the <i>Green Lantern</i> film, the movie isn't likely to touch on that critique. News reports from the start of the project said that the moviemakers were going back to the original source material and would hew to early Captain America tradition. Elisabeth Rappe, writing for Moviefone, stated, "I honestly think there would have been riots if they tried to update Captain America, so color me unsurprised by the news."</p>
<p>The original Cap didn't challenge much: Introduced in 1941, he was a scrawny, meek military recruit who becomes the only recipient of a super-soldier serum that augments him to the peak of human ability. The character was meant to be a totem of American ingenuity and grit and to drum up support for the war effort. The irony of creating a physically perfect blue-eyed blond guy as a counter to Nazi ideology was apparently lost on everyone.</p>
<p>Because he's an avatar for the nation's ideals, Captain America has served as a foil to whatever social anxieties people are wrestling with in the real world. After World War II, he fought communism, and after Watergate, a disillusioned Cap abandoned his superhero identity. In a recent, controversial story arc, he became a die-hard civil libertarian after the public called for preemptive monitoring of people with superpowers following a deadly explosion caused by costumed heroes -- a plot line alluding to surveillance overreach in the Iraq War era.</p>
<p>In 2001, Marvel Comics asked a writer of color, Robert Morales, to tell a Captain America story inspired by the notorious Tuskegee experiments, in which black men were used for four decades, from 1932 to 1972, as guinea pigs for scientists studying the long-term effects of untreated syphilis. Morales' story, <i>Truth: Red, White and Black</i>, focuses on a group of black soldiers in a segregated battalion during World War II. They are forced to participate in secret experiments by the U.S. government, which is attempting to re-create the super-soldier serum that augmented Captain America. In a memorable scene, military officers stare out at hundreds of black soldiers assembled at fictional Camp Cathcart. A visiting officer explains that he's shutting down the camp. "Camp Cathcart never existed," he says and then shoots the white man in charge. He orders a subordinate to round up 300 black soldiers onto trucks to be taken to an undisclosed location. Then he orders that the remaining soldiers, who don't make it onto the trucks, be disposed of. As some of the black soldiers are driven away, one asks, "Is that shooting I'm hearing?"</p>
<p>Only five of those 300 soldiers live through the experiments, and Isaiah Bradley is the only black super soldier to survive the war, albeit as a military prisoner and later as an urban legend among generations of black folks who is largely unknown to white America. The entire experience leaves him with the addled mind of a child. "It was so depressing I didn't think they would approve it," Morales says. "But it was depressingly realistic. And <i>likely</i>."</p>
<p>Morales says that there was push-back from fans who thought <i>Truth</i> made Cap a party to racial atrocity. But he rejected that criticism. "It's a book where every single person is complicit, one way or another," he says.</p>
<p>The frankness of the Isaiah Bradley story is light-years away from the earliest characterizations of black comic-book heroes. And using the pages of a comic book to critique actual American racial history is a stark contrast to the lightness with which superhero characters make it onto the big screen, when moviegoers expect acrobatics, explosions, and unambiguously good characters going after undisputed bad guys. In the comics, though, these characters aren't just positioned against such villains as Lex Luthor and the Joker. Their authority as agents of good requires that they be on the right side of history, too -- and what that means changes over time. Clark Kent's human family, for example, has been reimagined as the descendants of Kansas Free-Soilers and abolitionists. Superman is a vegetarian now, too. And Wayne Enterprises, the huge conglomerate whose largesse makes Bruce Wayne's nocturnal exploits as Batman possible, has been rethought as a pioneer in environmentalism.</p>
<p>These are now uncontroversial positions, of course. But comic-book characters are iconic and long-lived, and the world in which they were created is dramatically different from our current one. Writers routinely revisit stories to deepen their mythologies and, sometimes, to try to correct the errors of the past. Because these characters live throughout history -- many of them are a half-century old or more -- they don't have the luxury of living outside of it.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 10 May 2011 14:58:02 +0000149339 at http://prospect.orgGene DembyRethinking the Pro Tempore Rules.http://prospect.org/article/rethinking-pro-tempore-rules
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I'm on record as <a href="http://www.postbourgie.com/2010/06/28/byrd/">being</a> less than thrilled with the eulogizing of Robert Byrd, whose major accomplishments as a senator seem to have involved funneling money back to West Virginia and holding down his seat for a really, really long time. The length of his tenure placed him third in line for the presidency as president pro tempore, but since his passing, he's been replaced in that role by Hawaii's Daniel Inouye, who is 85. <strong>Chris Bonanos</strong> <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/07/three_heartbeats_away_do_we_ne.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nymag%2Fintel+%28Daily+Intelligencer+-+New+York+Magazine%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">wonders</a> if this setup, which coincides with the aging of the Senate in general, might call for a change in the pro tempore rules.</p>
<blockquote><p>It's not outlandish to suggest that managing the business of a powerful and complex state like New York or California is, even for a legislator, inherently more policy-driven than doing so for Alaska or West Virginia, and therefore more likely to qualify someone to be president. Instead, we have a system that inherently favors provincial guys who are good at hanging on to their jobs.</p>
<p>Therefore, since the president pro tempore is chosen not for his power but for his length of service, the job is likely to always go to a very, very old political hack. Which is fine for most of the president pro tem's job: gavel-wielding when the vice-president is out doing vice-presidential things. But presidential succession is another matter. (Do we want someone three heartbeats away who may, in fact, have only three or four heartbeats left in him?)</p></blockquote>
<p>Bonanos suggests a move in which the majority leader becomes pro tempore. That seems more politically feasible than setting some other effective cap on the age of the president pro tempore, like Senate term limits. As labor intensive as being a senator might be, it's not remotely as grueling as being president -- a job for which the doddering Strom Thurmond was prominently positioned for just a few years ago at the age of 100. </p>
<p><i>-- Gene Demby</i></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:04:56 +0000203662 at http://prospect.orgGene Demby"Acting White."http://prospect.org/article/acting-white
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Over at <i>The New Republic</i>, <b>John McWhorter</b> <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/guilt-trip">lavishes praise</a> on <b>Stuart Buck</b>'s book,<i> Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation</i>, which probably isn't terribly surprising. The thrust of Buck's book -- that blacks lag in educational outcomes because of a dysfunctional pathology that demonizes academic excellence -- has been McWhorter's pet cause for years. The idea that black kids who get good grades are accused of "acting white" gets so much play that it's taken as a given -- Barack Obama even went to that well at a campaign stop at a black church that was seen as dog-whistling to conservatives -- and McWhorter spends much of his review bristling at the idea that this alleged phenomenon is overstated, or even completely made up.</p>
<p>Despite McWhorter's protestations, though, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this meme, and Buck's reading of it in particular. Buck has said that he learned of this phenomenon after he and his wife adopted black children, and other white adoptive parents had also said that their children were teased by black kids for acting white. I don't mean to trivialize how unsettling this must have been to those parents, and how much it hurts for those kids to have their blackness called into question. But why is it a shock that black kids who are raised by white people might face extra hurdles in being accepted by other black kids? And if Buck's kids are indeed academic standouts, why attribute the taunts to the fact they're achievers and not, you know, because their parents are white? This is a pretty telling conflation, I think.</p>
<p>But setting aside Buck's particular situation, we know that in integrated schools, black students are less likely to be placed in Advanced Placement classes and <a href="http://www.jbhe.com/features/59_apscoringgap.html">more likely</a> to be placed in remedial ones. Black students are also more likely to be <a href="http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2007/10/the-discipline.html">punished</a> more harshly for the same infractions committed by whites. A consequence of that disparity means that black kids who are academic will be spending most of their school days and class time in the company of nonblack kids. Again, it's not clear that those kids are being told they're acting white because they're in AP classes and not because of the company they keep.</p>
<p>The "acting white" idea, not coincidentally, is embraced by conservatives who are most interested in explanations for lower black educational achievement that are not structural but cultural. This idea has serious policy implications -- McWhorter calls for black schools where black achievement will not be demonized, but others have used it to argue for charters and "school choice" -- even as the scale of this supposed phenomenon remains impossible to quantify, since so many of the arguments for the "acting white" phenomenon are anecdotal.</p>
<p><i>-- Gene Demby</i></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:27:37 +0000203651 at http://prospect.orgGene DembyThe Unbearable Whiteness of Bending.http://prospect.org/article/unbearable-whiteness-bending
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p> As much as I enjoyed <i>Avatar: The Last Airbender</i>, the excellent and popular animated epic that aired on Nickelodeon a few years ago, I'm viewing the premiere of its <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_%282008_film%29#Casting_controversy">movie adaptation</a> tomorrow with serious apprehension, and not simply because it's being helmed by <strong>M. Night Shyamalan</strong>. The television show is set in a deeply imagined world whose inhabitants are mostly Asian. Aang, the heroic Avatar, appears to be a Shaolin monk, with an origin story similar to that of the <strong>Dalai Lama</strong>. His fellow travelers, who hail from the fictional world's cold south, are comparatively darker-skinned and appear to be Inuit. And yet, as the blog <em>Racebending</em> <a href="http://www.racebending.com/v3/">has been pointing</a> out for some time now, the young actors playing those characters in the movie adaptation are white.</p>
<p>But it gets better. (And by "better," I mean much, much more problematic.) Zuko, the series' chief villain, comes from a country patterned after imperialist China. In the film, he's <a href="http://www.daemonsmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/last_airbender_zuko_dev_patel1.jpg">played</a> by <strong>Dev Patel</strong> of <em>Slumdog Millionaire</em> fame. The hothead general of the army <a href="http://greatganesha.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/mandvi.jpg">hunting</a> the Avatar? <strong>Aasif Mandvi</strong> of <em>The Daily Show</em>. The ruthless <a href="http://cliffcurtis.fansiter.com/pictures/cliff-a-brown-jacket.jpg">leader</a> of the evil Fire Nation? <strong>Cliff Curtis</strong> of <em>Whale Rider</em>. So to recap: The source material is set in a world in which nearly all the characters are Asian, but the movie ends up with a crew of good guys who are all white and a slew of bad guys who are all brown. </p>
<p>This isn't an accident, as the casting directors <a href="http://io9.com/5512941/who-sent-out-the-last-airbender-casting-call-asking-for-caucasian-actors-producer-responds">were instructed</a> to find kids to play the good guys who were "Caucasian or any other ethnicity," while casting calls for extras of the Fire Nation -- the story's bad guys -- explicitly requested people who were "Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, Asian, Mediterranean, and Latino." </p>
<p>For his part, Shyamalan <a href="http://www.hollywoodnews.com/2010/06/26/shyamalan-addresses-last-airbender-race-bending-controversy/">has denied</a> that race played a roll in casting and said that he was simply looking "for the best fit" for each role. But as we know in all areas of public life, meritocracy <a href="http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20100426_Left_s_answer_to_John_Roberts.html">is always</a> the explanation when the person landing the job is white. Affirmative action, or some other reason, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/guy-t-saperstein/pat-buchanan-attacks-affi_b_238313.html">is always</a> the explanation when it's not. <strong>Frank Marshall</strong>, the movie's producer, <a href="http://www.ugo.com/movies/frank-marshall-clarifies-key-issue-in-racebending-controversy">has apologized</a> for the casting-call documents, which he said were created by a third-party casting company but should have been more closely monitored. </p>
<p>It's hard enough to be an actor of color without roles for characters of color magically becoming white when those films hit the big screen. Just last month, Jake Gyllenhaal made his bid for action-hero stardom in <em>The Prince of Persia</em>. But since Hollywood clearly sees race as so fluid and inconsequential, no one should <a href="http://trueslant.com/jamellebouie/2010/05/28/why-cant-peter-parker-be-black/#comment-208">object</a> to Donald Glover being cast as the titular character in the next Spider-Man flick, right? </p>
<p><em>-- Gene Demby</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:19:17 +0000203631 at http://prospect.orgGene DembySprinkle Some Brown on it.http://prospect.org/article/sprinkle-some-brown-it
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Along with his fellow Republicans, <strong>Jeff Sessions</strong> spent much of the first day of <strong>Elena Kagan</strong>'s confirmation hearings weirdly <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062805129.html" target="_blank">taking aim</a> at the storied judicial career of <strong>Thurgood Marshall</strong>. Why? Because Marshall was an enemy of originalists, and the senators wanted to portray Kagan, who clerked for him, as cut from the same ideological cloth.</p>
<p>Later in the day, though, Sessions <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/sessions-compares-citizens-united-to-landmark-civil-rights-case.php" target="_blank">compared</a> the Supreme Court's decision in <em>Citizens United</em>, which granted corporations the right to make unlimited political donations, to <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>, the landmark civil-rights case that declared de jure racial segregation unconstitutional. In the <em>Citizen's United</em> case, he said, the court went back to the principles of the Constitution to apply equal protection of the laws.</p>
<blockquote><p>"Is it treating people equally to say you can go to this school because of the color of your skin and you can't?" Sessions asked rhetorically. "We've now honestly concluded and fairly concluded that it violates the equal protection clause."</p>
<p>How is that like Citizens United? "I think this Court, when they said 'Wait a minute! If you're talking about a precedent that says the government can deny the right to publish pamphlets, then we've got get rid of this one outlier case Austin -- 100 years of precedent -- and go back to what the Constitution [says].' I don't think that's activism."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Buried in this tortured analogy is a pretty illustrative example of how amorphous originalism actually is. The decision in <em>Brown</em>, arguably the most famous case taken on by the legendarily activist Warren Court, was (and still is) decried by many conservatives as judicial overreach. Yet as <strong>Sherilyn Ifill</strong> <a href="http://www.theroot.com/views/judicial-activism-right" target="_blank">points out</a>, <strong>Chief Justice Roberts</strong> actually invoked <em>Brown</em> in the<em> Citizens United</em> ruling precisely <em>because</em> it eschewed precedent; “if the court never departed from precedent, ‘segregation would be legal.’”
</p>
<p>Because <em> Brown</em> is one of those moments that affirms the goodness of American character, and because its fundamental rightness is taken as a given now (in a way that certainly was not true when it was decided), it’s often brought up this way, as a cover for expansive readings of the Constitution that bring about results favorable to conservative causes.</p>
<p>So they want to give corporations new ways to involve themselves in the political process but are bound by campaign finance laws from doing so? No worries! Just sprinkle some <em>Brown</em> on it.</p>
<p><i>-- Gene Demby</i></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:38:14 +0000203633 at http://prospect.orgGene DembyShutting the Rubber Rooms.http://prospect.org/article/shutting-rubber-rooms
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Yesterday, New York City finally <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/education/29rubber.html">shuttered</a> its notorious "rubber rooms," the Kafkaesque solution devised by officials to deal with teachers who were deemed unfit to remain in classrooms but, armed with tenure, were essentially unfireable. Suspended teachers could only be dismissed from their jobs after a protracted appeals process that could stretch on for months or years, and during which they still received their full salaries. </p>
<p>The unfireable teachers were still required to show up every day to one of several rooms across the city on a schedule that approximated a normal school day. They sat there with nothing to do. It was a long, wasteful war of attrition, with the city hoping that the tedium would eventually compel the suspended teachers to quit. The rubber roomers have now been reassigned to the city's department of education offices, where they'll work until their cases are resolved.</p>
<p>It's hard to tell whether the rubber-room issue was a bigger embarrassment to the school system or to the teacher's union itself. It's the union's job to protect its members, of course. But the inability to fire even the worst teachers was an unmitigated disaster for students. A <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/">growing</a> body of evidence suggests that teacher quality is so important a factor in student outcomes that it can offset other considerable factors in a child's education. That is, a good teacher can negate the effects of going to an otherwise bad school; a lousy teacher can negate the effects of going to a good one. </p>
<p>But designating teachers as unfireable means any serious conversation about good and bad teachers -- of what they look like -- is essentially tabled. The end result is that the nation's largest public school system essentially <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill">grades</a> all of its teachers "competent," leaving the difficult work of fixing schools undone in the face of maintaining polite fictions. </p>
<p><i>-- Gene Demby</i></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:56:16 +0000203615 at http://prospect.orgGene DembyWelcome Gene Demby, Guest Blogger for the Week.http://prospect.org/article/welcome-gene-demby-guest-blogger-week
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><i>Please welcome </i><b>Gene Demby</b><i>, who will be guest-blogging for </i>TAPPED<i> this week</i>:</p>
<p>Allow me to reintroduce myself.</p>
<p>My name is Gene Demby, the founder of a blog called <a href="http://www.postbourgie.com/"><i>PostBourgie</i></a>. PB was founded because I found that so many online discussions about the issues affecting "black life" in America --- education, crime, family, the towering wackness of, say, Soulja Boy --- often devolved into unhelpful, self-congratulatory sermons that oversimplified complicated issues. Since I started that little venture a few years back, my talented blogmates and friends have been picked off by various progressive new media outfits, of which <i>The American Prospect</i> is <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/author?id=2543">probably</a> the most egregious <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=01&amp;year=2010&amp;base_name=please_welcome_our_new_associa&amp;3">offender</a>. So here I am, standing athwart history, yelling: me too!</p>
<p>I'm honored that the smart, sharp folks at TAPPED are letting me pinch-hit for a spell. I'll try not to drink all the cranberry juice.</p>
<p><i>-- Gene Demby</i></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:22:53 +0000203610 at http://prospect.orgGene Demby